Read our interview with John's Jor Khao Tuen sidekick Por Mor here.
I was born into an academic family. My dad is a historian, my mother a feminist who teaches at Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. My other two siblings are also professors; it’s only me and my sister Rosie [Wongsurawat, Managing Director of Jor Khao Tuen] who went into entertainment.
The ideas for Jor Khao Tuen start from our family conversations over the weekend about what’s hot right now. Then we sum up everything at a meeting on Monday, do some fact checking and draft a script.
I was so excited when The New York Times contacted us for an interview. It showed how much progress our production company Spokedark had made after our first two years as iHere.TV [2008-2010], when we earned almost nothing.
Are you sure this is what you wanted to present us? This was the question every channel asked us. We had low-cost production values, I know, but the ideas were fresh. In the end, they were only worried about the message of the program. It got to the point where Rosie and I were rejected from every free-to-air TV channel. We insisted on continuing with it, so we went online.
I was so disappointed in Thai media at that time. I thought about nothing but my own ideals. That’s what drove me to go online as iHere TV. But after starting my own business, I kind of came to understand that it was a risk for them to accept our show, as it could affect others on the channel.
We were invited as a ‘Media Activist of Thailand’ to the Asian Film Festival in Germany back in 2012. The festival gathered people from all over the world. I was surprised as I never thought of us as activists. Maybe being the very first program in Thailand broadcasting online was behind it.
Interview programs often piss me off by not asking the big questions. They use technical jargon to tackle complex issues like women’s rights or the law. Why don’t they simplify things for their audience, so that these hard-to-understand issues are approachable. I guess, in this regard, we could be seen as activists. We take responsibility for the subjects we report on.
Online media is very strong and reaches way more people today than when we started. Previously, most of our audience was university students and first-jobbers in Bangkok and the big cities. Now we’ve got audiences in a lot more provinces and a wider demographic. We’ve got kids aged 10-12 and adults in the 40-50 range watching our show.
Obviously, it’s not only Jor Khao Tuen presenting the news online. There are so many more channels and information sources to draw on. We have to work out the best way to cope with all the information and make it useful for people.
The online mediascape is changing fast. We used to earn next to nothing. Agencies used to believe that ads had to be very cheap on the internet. It’s taken some time, but we’ve helped them understand otherwise.
We need to keep mistakes down to a minimum, as we know we’re taking risks. A couple of times we’ve presented incorrect figures and photos, and our audiences picked up on it. We quickly rechecked and clarified things on our next show.
Negative comments on the internet are inevitable. I’m personally used to people saying I’m just a kid who knows nothing about politics. I used to be so paranoid, it would affect my confidence and piss me off. Then my sister told me simply not to read this stuff.
I’ve seen the development of our audiences through those comments. Previously, it would be these outrageous, unnecessary comments, but now there are amazing debates where people try to beat each other with research rather than insults. And the surprising thing is that people will accept defeat, too, without creating this big internet drama. That benefits us all.
We’re open to comments but we’re not going to change to favor everyone. We believe in our process of researching information and the accuracy of what we report. Sometimes it’s so obvious that people just want us to say something for their benefit.
It’s not that news on free-to-air TV these days is not reliable. What I’m more concerned about is how they compete with each other to break the news. It’s like who gets the news quicker wins and that’s all they care about. The result is lots of news without any depth.
Online news has made the industry even more competitive. Thinking positively, I hope this will increase the standards of reporting and we’ll have more investigative news programs.
I used to be so upset about the world but now I find Jor Khao Tuen is my mental therapy. I have my own space to speak my mind on topics and angles no one else wants to touch.
There’s democracy in Thailand, even if people say we’ve never had a real one. It is democracy. But the fact is Thailand has never completed a single chapter. We begin a chapter and read half of it before someone forces us to stop and move onto a new one.
I’ve got no problem with people coming out to exercise their rights. I supported the protest against the Amnesty Bill, but somehow the subject turned into something else. I don’t know how anyone can say the act of voting is against democracy. Everyone knows that’s a lie.
Compromise is unacceptable nowadays. Instead of coming out and debating the idea, we turn away from everyone who thinks differently from us.
It’s hard to tell how things are going to end. History shows us that situations often end surprisingly. I just hope that this time we can end things peacefully and that the next chapter of Thai politics is more peaceful.
